Hello everyone, this article is an English translation of my blog article (French version).
In this guide, I will explain you how to diagnose and isolate physical bad sectors in your hard drive. The tool that I'll be presenting will help you partition your disk automatically while keeping bad physical sectors outside the usable partitions.
If your computer starts running very slowly or if you start having errors mentioning In/Out problems or hard drive-related problems, you might have bad sectors. Bad sectors can occur if your computer gets hit or is moved while powered on (this means that this problem occurs more often with laptops).
There are two types of bad sectors :
We can check our hard drives with a free software called Crystal Disk Info. It will show you a detailed report about your hard drive since day one. Below a screenshot.
The software interface is pretty simple and displays all the needed information that you're going to need. The main highlights are :
If the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology poked your attention you might want to understand more what's happening with your hard drive. Mainly, every mechanical Hard Drive or Solid State Disk is equipped with the S.M.A.R.T. feature so that your Operating System can keep tabs on the physical state of your precious disk. It helps anticipating errors, correcting them and preventing major data loss.
If you want to learn more about S.M.A.R.T., you can check out the Wikipedia article about S.M.A.R.T. over here
You will be focusing on the "Health Status" section, mainly you will have three states :
chkdsk !Alright! After checking out our S.M.A.R.T. data, we can attempt to fix our hard drive's logical bad sectors with a
simple command in Windows. To do so, open "cmd" or use the shortcut (on Windows 10) Windows Key + X then "Windows PowerShell (admin)", you'll have a a command prompt, write chkdsk /F C: where "C:" is the drive you want to check and fix. You can learn more about the chkdsk command in this article.
After the check process, you'll be informed if chkdsk successfully fixed those logical bad sectors. If it's the case, shut down your PC then boot it up (don't reboot it). Open Crystal Disk Info and check if your hard drive health status changed.
If you're encuntrying problems copying your files from your failing hard drive, do not lose hope, we can probably fix this with the right tools and some patience. Let's start by downloading Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier then install it. This fantastic software is the best when you need to copy files from unreadable sources. It can almost copy every bit of data with enough time and patience. I've used it to copy files from hard drives suffering of bad sectors and even heavily scratched CDs and DVDs. Below a screenshot of Unstoppable Copier.
To copy your files, it's fairly simple, just choose your source and destination and hit that "Copy" button. Of course, you can fine tune all the settings or heck even batch copy files, but I'll leave this to you.
Once you've started copying, Unstoppable Copier will output charts of data and all what you need to make sure you copying process is all okay.
Finally, after diagnosing your hard drive state and copying all your beloved data, we can re-partition your hard drive and isolate those bad sectors. We will use this free software called Repartition Bad Drive. Below a screenshot of the software.
The software will go through every single sector of your hard drive writing data on it then reading it again, if a sector proves to be unusable the software will isolate it in an empty zone and create a partition surrounding the bad sector. Using this method, your Operating System won't write data on those bad sectors and you'll give your hard drive a new purpose.
A couple of things need to be discussed before you jump into the re-partitioning process :
Start Repartition Bad Drive, plug your hard drive using and external USB adapter (recommended even if the speeds are slow) and once you see your drive in the drives list, select it and click the "Repartition Drive Selected" button. Wait until the process finishes and voilà !
If you've spotted a spelling error or some inconsistency, please let me know. Also, I'm available if you need help or want to share your experience following this guide. Your feedback motivates me to improve my articles.